Finian's Rainbow!

I just saw Finian's Rainbow and it was SO GOOD. The music is beautiful, and the cast was uniformly excellent. Terri White is fantastic, and Cheyenne Jackson gives me the vapors. (The plot is totally insane and could plausibly have been written by playing Boggle drunk, but that weirdly does not detract from the experience at all.) It was even better because I saw it with Maria, who is in from Oxford for a week. We already spend all of our time looking for innuendo and problematizing fairy tales, so seeing a musical about racism and immigration and free markets was pretty much a goldmine. When they made a reference to red propaganda, we were the only people who were like, "oops!" and cracked up laughing as the old people around us just looked befuddled. And then afterwards, we got dinner at Room Service and talked about how the leprechaun and deaf ballerina were basically a fucked-up Pygmalion story, and I was like, Jesus, I have missed you.

It is basically a multicultural acid dream, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. If you're in New York, you should totally try to see it before it closes on Sunday. (Also, my friend Lauren is in it. Shameless plug!)

Calm Down, Courteney Cox

I should start watching mid-season TV shows more often. I was too lazy to get up to avoid Cougar Town after watching Modern Family tonight, and I was like, "Courteney Cox looks upset. Who is that man? Since when do they have a baby? Why is the bar empty? How are these characters related? Is this a dream sequence? I don't understand what Courteney Cox is so upset about." It was like going to a movie with an elderly person. I'm grateful that Brady did not murder me in my chair.

Survival of the Dullest

David just went back to DC to start the spring semester, and this sucks for two reasons. One is that David is in DC to start the spring semester. The other is that David is my excuse to postpone things that I know I should be doing. I've spent the past month being like, "I have some work to do, but I can do it tomorrow if you want to go ice skating and then find someplace with vegetarian duck." Or "I should clean the bathroom, but I cannot do that knowing that you have never seen Season Two of Sex and the City." Or "I was thinking of spending the weekend working on my dissertation, but then I thought that it would be fun to smash and devour our entire gingerbread house while splitting a bottle of wine and watching Weeds. I already found a hammer."

You know what I did tonight? I steamed vegetables and spent two hours working on journal articles at Fordham, and now I'm going to do sit-ups. I don't care if long distance is a kind of subconscious survival strategy on my part, it is pretty fucking boring.

Good Night, Moon

I don't know whether I'm alarmed or thrilled that I could picture a number of people in my life being this man. But this is excellent.

Never Trust a Man With A Mustache

First, North Dakota lost the world's tallest structure to Dubai, and now we lost Byron Dorgan, who's like the only other thing we're known for. (Also: the movie Fargo, which actually mostly takes place in Bemidji. But that's not going anywhere because Marge Gunderson is untouchable.)

I'm bummed about this, but I am so ridiculously excited about the prospect that Heidi Heitkamp might run for Senate. I was like a diehard fan of hers when she ran against John Hoeven for governor when I was fifteen (because I was a dork that way!) and that has not changed. She is classy, and John Hoeven has a mustache. You do the math.

Wheel of Misfortune

I had a really long day and was like, ugh, I just want to go home and watch old people television with my wife, and so David and I made dinner and sat down to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Somehow ALL THREE PEOPLE on Wheel of Fortune managed to get "Regis Phil_in and Kell_ Ripa" wrong, including by guessing "Regis Philmin" and getting EVERY LETTER before managing to mispronounce Kelly Ripa's last name. And then we were like, ugh, old people are so stressful and so we watched Sex and the City reruns because David has never seen it before and Emma lent us Season Two.

I realized that the easiest way to explain the show was to tell David that Carrie is the Dorothy, Miranda is the Sophia, Charlotte is the Rose, and Samantha is the Blanche. During a particularly racy scene, David was like, "...this is like Golden Girls Gone Wild," which I think would be a pretty awesome Before and After.

Happy New Year's!

"Oh, it's just like you're a family. I mean a pretend family, under the laws of the state of New York."
- Brady